The following is an essay I wrote for my American Identity in Film class at UC Berkeley during the Spring 2012 semester. I studied David Lynch’s neo-noir film Mulholland Drive to analyze how class differences are represented both literally, as financial success, as well as through emotion, as a theme synonymous with romantic “success” as love.

The role class plays in film has always been an intriguing one. The scholars Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin define class as “categorizing people according to their economic status” in their work America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies (167). Class can be defined absolutely through wealth, such as in the screwball comedy It Happened One Night or through imitation and mockery, like in The Lady Eve. Conceptions of class can be framed within any discourse established for a particular…

My ambition when I started this blog in college was to write essays about every movie, good or bad, that I see – but given the sheer volume of films I regularly plow through, plus the tough spot of forcing myself to write about movies I may simply not care enough about, I quickly realized this was an impossible dream.

A more manageable alternative is to write quick, high-level takes on my movie views. The ones that strike greater thought and introspection will certainly warrant a lengthier blog post (sooner or later), but this way I can stay engaged with the community on a more regular basis.

It’s almost Halloween so of course the horror/thriller movies are ramping up and will carry over into next week — but from this past week, I watched (in addition to a disc of Dark Shadows, which I’m slowly but steadily working through):